Several antennas have been purchased for the purposes of ensuring the most ideal long range solution is obtained. While it is clear that some antennas (like the Mad Mushroom) should have good performance, this antenna is somewhat fragile and may not be able to maintain structural integrity during high accelerations. For this reason, we may need to compromise between signal strength/range and antenna type/robustness.
Below are the antennas that have been purchased.
Much work has been done to the payload. Some pictures of what has been created are below.
There has been a lot of work on the code side of things for the payload including the inclusion of SSDV code to send the pictures taken in packets of 256 Bytes. SSDV is a sophisticated method of sending pictures with error correction. It is well suited for slow links, such as rtty connections from high altitude balloons. In the case of this payload, we wish to share the bandwidth with other data, i.e. we don’t want to use x-modem like what was done in the HAB, because when we do, we get no other data.
Other work has been on the GroundStation where we have replaced SQLITE3 database with Postgres because of locking issues with SQLITE3. SQLITE3 is good for non-critical, low data situations. We saw a marked improvement wit the use of Postgres.
A week ago, we got to use this the above hardware to launch a Model Rocket. The launch itself was perfect, but the electronics had a few issues…issues we were able to diagnose and overcome on the launch day. We believe these have since been resolved.
For those interested, below are a few pictures of the rocket launch.
